paragon of gratitude on the plate-shop roof said). The money had come as a result of
oil and oil-leases, and there was close to a million dollars. No, Hadley wasn’t a
millionaire–that might have made even him happy, at least for a while–but the
brother had left a pretty damned decent bequest of thirty-five thousand dollars to each surviving member of his family back in Maine, if they could be found. Not bad. Like
getting lucky and winning a sweepstakes.
But to Byron Hadley the glass was always half-empty. He spent most of the
morning bitching to Mert about the bite that the goddam government was going to
take out of his windfall. “They’ll leave me about enough to buy a new car with,’ he allowed, ‘and then what happens? You have to pay the damn taxes on the car, and the
repairs and maintenance, you get your goddam kids pestering you to take ’em for a
ride with the top down -‘
‘And to drive it, if they’re old enough,’ Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew
which side his bread was buttered on, and he didn’t say what must have been as
obvious to him as to the rest of us: If that money’s worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I’ll just take it off your hands. After all, what are friends for?
That’s right, wanting to drive it, wanting to learn to drive on it, for Chrissake, ‘
Byron said with a shudder. ‘Then what happens at the end of the year? If you figured
the tax wrong and you don’t have enough left over to pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own pocket, or maybe even borrow it from one of those kikey loan
agencies. And they audit you anyway, you know. It don’t matter. And when the
government audits you, they always take more. Who can fight Uncle Sam? He puts
his hand inside your shirt and squeezes your tit until it’s purple, and you end up
getting the short end. Christ.’ He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what
terrible bad luck he’d had to inherit that $35,000. Andy Dufresne had been spreading
tar with a big Padd brush less than fifteen feet away and now he tossed it into his pail and walked over to where Mert and Hadley were sitting.
We all tightened up, and I saw one of the other screws, Tim Youngblood, drag
his hand down to where his pistol was bolstered. One of the fellows in the sentry
tower struck his partner on the arm and they both turned, too. For one moment I
thought Andy was going to get shot, or clubbed, or Then he said, very softly, to
Hadley: ‘Do you trust your wife?’ Hadley just stared at him. He was starting to get red
in the face, and I knew that was a bad sign. In about three seconds he as going to pull his billy and give Andy the butt end of it right in the solar plexus, where that big
bundle of nerves is. A hard enough hit there can kill you, but they always go for it. If itdoesn’t kill you it will paralyze you long enough to forget whatever cute move it was that you had planned.
“Boy,” Hadley said, ‘I’ll give you just one chance to pick up that Padd. And then you’re goin’ off this roof on your head.’
Andy just looked at him, very calm and still. His eyes were like ice. It was as
if he hadn’t heard. And I found myself wanting to tell him how it was, to give him the crash course.
The crash course is you never let on that you hear the guards talking, you
never try to horn in on their conversation unless you’re asked (and then you always
tell them just what they wanting to hear and shut up again). Black man, white man,
red man., yellow man, in prison it doesn’t matter because we’ve got our own brand of
equality. In prison every con’s a nigger and you have to get used to the idea if you
intend to survive men like Hadley and Greg Staminas, who really would kill you. just